54 karma · joined March 29, 2018
The webinar link is below - pretty cool to see how teams use metrics to really enhance the way they work. Even cooler to hear how happy the engineering team was after removing all those annoying friction points in the development process :)
We've found that evaluating individuals, stack ranking teams, and measuring an individual's 'productivity' to be an ultimately futile effort.
It's more important to focus on team delivery as described in many research studies. My favorite being the book Accelerate by nicole forsgren. If you haven't, I do encourage you to check it out!
As the founder of Haystack I can be seen as biased so its probably more helpful to checkout their research across thousands of teams on what makes an 'elite engineering team' and how elite engineering teams ultimately help drive successful organizations across profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction :)
In the meantime, we've opened up our team Slack (link below) if you'd like more info on Haystack (or just want to jam about metrics with other eng leaders from companies like Microsoft and The Economist).
I believe this link should work: https://www.usehaystack.io/haystack-slack-community
And sorry for the technical difficulties. Should be resolved shortly.
But I suppose we will be building a Bitbucket integration shortly?
1. While we do use pull requests as a unit of measure, we don't actually consider # of commits and # of pull requests as great proxies for productivity. We mainly track Cycle Time, Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate, and Throughput which help encapsulate speed vs. quality of an engineering teams. It's important for engineering metrics to correlate to engineering work. Specifically, that the engineering team has full control over those metrics. When looking from an Epic, Story, or Task perspective - this is often controlled by other parties, making it more difficult to know if engineering itself is improving or not. In addition to this, Epics often don't reflect actual engineering work in the same way that pull requests in Github do making them problematic to focus on.
2. Because we focus on engineering work itself from Github. Haystack can be used with any methodology so long as the team is using Git!
3. From an engineering perspective, the main goal is '# of successful iterations'. Product's main goal is that those successful iterations are pointed in the right direction. Looking at # of successful iterations (aka speed, deployment frequency, and quality) allow us to see how often we deploy value to customers and what is the quality of those deployments. Focusing on these metrics allow engineering teams to improve 'how they deliver'.
4. We actively don't look at individual engineers and we especially don't compare them using any metric since we've seen that lead to some bad takeaways like the one you mentioned. We help measure at the team-level to simply highlight improvements and bottlenecks rather than cross-compare any team or individual which is like comparing apples to oranges
Be bold. Make change. Improve the way you work.
Was cancelling standups going to far? Maybe. But that's not the point.
Any and all feedback is appreciated and thank you for checking it out if you do!
www.githustle.com
www.githustle.com
Sales Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VTMT6TC
Developer Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/37H5XBC
Sales Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VTMT6TC
Developer Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/37H5XBC
Nobody wants to give up their golden project, to someone that doesn't care as much as them.
Hopefully this app will do justice in providing equal incentives for both sides. Like I said in my comment to @theuncommon:
This app isn't so much to "find someone to do a job for me", "find the perfect co-founder", or to "build a company" like so many apps out there already do. The goal of this app is to bring to life the projects on the shelf. To revive the github graveyard, and maybe make some extra cash while you do it.
There are so many great ideas just sitting, unused because developers simply don't have the time/motivation to go out and sell the thing. After all, we have side projects for the love of building. Not the love of selling and marketing.
From a sales perspective, you get access to great products with sales potential.
From the dev perspective, it gives your project a chance to live while granting you the luxury of being able to focus on building (not sales).
Both parties have an opportunity to make a good chunk of change on the side.
The app is basically a place for developers and sales to get together and help each other out. Developers are constantly working on side projects, it's just how we operate. Constantly creating and building cool things we want to see in the world. These side projects too often get put on the shelf, never used. This is what I call the github graveyard.
This app isn't so much to "find someone to do a job for me", "find the perfect co-founder", or to "build a company" like so many apps out there already do. The goal of this app is to bring to life the projects on the shelf. To revive the github graveyard, and maybe make some extra cash while you do it.
There are so many great ideas just sitting, unused because developers simply don't have the time/motivation to go out and sell the thing. After all, we have side projects for the love of building. Not the love of selling and marketing.
From a sales perspective, you get access to great products with sales potential.
From the dev perspective, it gives your project a chance to live while granting them the luxury of being able to focus on building (not sales).
Both parties have an opportunity to make a good chunk of change on the side.
To give a bit more backstory, I have been the visionary time and time again. I found that my connection to the use case, passion, and vision helped me build great products. After all, I'm a developer and I love building out the passion projects that I want to see in the world. But even as the passionate visionary, I kept finding myself hitting the same wall. I have a full-time job and I love building software, but I'm not a salesman. I'm not a marketer, and I certainly don't have time to do all three jobs. This led to a bit of burnout, loss of inspiration, and eventually a bigger github graveyard.
Don't get me wrong, I know that without a visionary the project is dead before it even began. My whole goal with this app is to help fellow developers and visionaries find help to bring their projects to life.
It's tough being a one-man (or one-woman) show. Developing, selling, marketing, getting feedback, among other jobs is tough! Especially for your passion side-projects.
Let's get you visionaries some help. Let's get those projects out into the world. Let's stop adding to our github graveyards. Let's make some money while doing it.
PUT AN END TO GITHUB GRAVEYARDS. LET YOUR PROJECTS LIVE. GET PAID FOR YOUR WORK.
I’m hoping that this app can help developers with the sales, and with a few successes and iterations on the idea, help with marketing too.
Initially I’d like the app to be very clean and focused, which is why it’s limited to connecting only dev and sales for now. So many other apps have too many options and are focused on “building teams” or finding “co-founders”. This app’s goal is simple:
Let’s get dev some help, and give sales some side hustle opportunities.
They both have incentive to help each other out, bring great projects to life, and make a few extra bucks while they’re at it.
I'm half kidding, half serious. I found myself in your exact position several times before. Often times, the reality isn't that "nobody cares about our projects" but really that they haven't seen enough love from "other side".
As developers, we excel at building great products. We often think that a great product will sell itself, and that people will be excited to buy after just hearing about what we have to offer. I've definitely found myself in this frame of mind time and time again, I've found that this simply isn't the case. Even the greatest products in the world needs some love from the sales/marketing fronts, and without that, it's particularly difficult to "get people excited" about what you have to offer. Thinking that "nobody cares about our projects as much as we do" is something that I have found particularly destructive to my project success and progress (and often leads to a larger graveyard). Hopefully my app can help projects like ours get a chance at some traction and get people to care!
END THE GRAVEYARD! GIVE YOUR PROJECT A CHANCE AT THE LIME LIGHT!
Very pumped to get some developer feedback here as well, much appreciated! I'll post the app soon, let's get your graveyard back up and running!
I'm happy to hear about Ghost Engine and Salesory, since it seems to show some demand for the type of "outsourced" or "freelance" sales that this app would be tailored to.
The sales incentive design will definitely be a huge contributor to the success of this project. If you have any feedback on incentive designs that you know are successful or that you would like to see, please let me know!
The way I see it is from the sales perspective, you get access to great products that have sales potential. It gives a seller the ability to make extra cash on the side, while the dev is granted the luxury of being able to focus on what they do best. Build.
Several apps out there are hyper focused on building teams, businesses, and finding co-founders. This proves very difficult for the exact reasons you mentioned, among others.
The main focus of this app is getting the underground projects a chance at the lime light. Connecting dev and sales in a way that they can give their projects life (and make some money doing it). It's not attempting to "find the perfect cofounder" or "build the perfect team" but simply to connect the right people, with the right skill-sets to get projects off the ground (and make money doing it).